Starting a rugged four-game trip in which they’ll play four games in six days, with the last three of them on the west coast, the Caps grabbed two points from the Islanders in New York on Sunday afternoon to start the trip on the good foot.
Tom Wilson had a pair of goals and an assist to fuel the offense, but the Washington hero of the afternoon was Logan Thompson, who picked up his 11th victory of the season with a 30-save outing in the Caps’ 4-1 victory, a margin inflated by a pair of late empty-net goals.
Sunday’s victory gives the Caps a four-game winning streak, matching their longest of the season to date. They’ve won seven of their last eight overall (7-1-0).
During a recent fallow stretch in which the Caps won two of nine games (2-6-1), their process was good, but the results were not commensurate. Today’s game was the opposite; Washington didn’t have its usual assertiveness in the offensive zone, and it relied heavily on Thompson, particularly in the first period.
“He gave us a chance early on to find our footing,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery of Thompson’s performance. “[We] gave up too many odd-man rushes early in that hockey game, and we're caught off guard a little bit with their speed and transition. We made a few mistakes with our F3 and our [defensemen] pinching in some situations.
“So, he bails us out and gives us a chance to find our footing, we get a power play, get up in that game and then we’re able to hang on.”
Afternoon games can be tricky for teams; routines are disrupted and sometimes it can take a bit to get the motor up and running. Fortunately for the Caps, Thompson started on time. He was needed early and often on Sunday, starting with an old school windmill save on Anders Lee on a 2-on-1 feed from Mat Barzal in the first minute of the contest.
Ryan Leonard drew a tripping penalty on New York’s teenage phenom defenseman Matthew Schaefer in the front half of the first frame, and the Caps wasted little time in using that extra man opportunity to grab an early lead.
Dylan Strome won the offensive zone draw, and the Caps established position. On the right side, Leonard found a seam and went cross-ice for Alex Ovechkin, who sent it down to Wilson at the goal line. From there, Wilson merely bumped it past a sliding Ilya Sorokin on the short side for a 1-0 Washington lead at 7:37 of the first, just a dozen seconds after Schaefer had been seated in the box.
“That's a heck of a play,” says Carbery of Ovechkin’s team-high 12th primary assist. “In order to win a game like this on the road where you don't have your best, you need a few things to happen, whether it's special teams, or whether it's a goaltending performance. “We get both of those. LT holds us in early, and then all of a sudden you get a power play, so that can build you a lead. It was a great play by O and by Willie; that's a great touch at the side of the net right there.”
Less than a minute later, Thompson denied Jonathan Drouin on another 2-on-1 rush with Barzal supplying the setup feed.
Thompson’s next two stops were both on Lee in short succession, and both were on tip-in tries from down low with little time to react. All these saves came in the first half of the first frame; Thompson made one more key stop late, thwarting Barzal’s wraparound try in the final minute.
“They’re a good team, a lot of offense,” says Thompson. “And you know some of their players are really good at the net front. The biggest thing is I try to hold my feet as much as I can, and I just try to get as much as I can behind the puck. And luckily, for the majority of the game I thought my body was behind a lot of the pucks. And that’s a credit to the guys in front of me as well; I thought the [defense] did a good job of letting me see and track the pucks tonight.”
Washington fell into some penalty soup early in the second, taking a pair of minors before the first television timeout. Thompson made four stops while the Caps were shorthanded, the most notable of which was a lateral save on Max Shabonov.
The Caps couldn’t seem to sustain much in the offensive zone in the second period, but they were able to double their lead on a gift goal in the back half of the period.
Sorokin went behind the net to play the puck after a dump in. He looked for an outlet, and then unwisely tried to put the puck to Schaefer in front, but a forechecking Wilson got a stick on it and backhanded it into the vacant net, making it 2-0 at 13:58.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those in my career, on a goalie turnover up the middle like that,” says Wilson of what would prove to be the game-winning goal. “It was kind of lucky; I think he was trying to go a little bit further with it, and I just made a bit of a read and got lucky to knock it down.”
In the third, Washington had just two shots on net in the first 18 minutes, the second of which came from neutral ice at the 6:20 mark. The Islanders drew a penalty, went on the power play, and halved the Caps’ lead to 2-1 when Bo Horvat chipped a rebound to the shelf at 13:43.
New York had big advantages in offensive zone possession time, slot shots on net, odd-man rushes and high danger scoring chances, but Thompson ensured there would be no late Islander heroics to force overtime and create a three-point game situation against a division rival.
With just under two minutes left, Matt Roy made a heady play from deep in Washington ice. Spotting Aliaksei Protas in motion near the Caps’ blueline, Roy correctly calculated that the big winger would be able to outrace an Islander to the puck to negate an icing call. Protas went one better; he one-timed the puck into the net off the back wall from a bit of a tough angle at 18:49, making it 3-1 Washington.
In the final minute, Ovechkin notched an empty-net goal – No. 909 of his NHL career – to account for the 4-1 final.
“The guys did a great job down the stretch,” says Wilson, who passed T.J. Oshie (192) and Dave Christian (193) to move into eighth place on Washington’s all-time goals list. “It wasn’t our best 60 [minutes] per se, but we did enough to get it done.”
